


Rope and Pulley

by levendis



Series: Prompt Fics [89]
Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Dubious Consent, F/M, Sex Pollen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-02
Updated: 2016-08-02
Packaged: 2018-07-28 20:25:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,074
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7655521
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/levendis/pseuds/levendis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Doctor is in a bad way, sexually; Clara has mixed feelings about it. Yr basic sex-pollen fic.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Rope and Pulley

**Author's Note:**

> for anon, who prompted: During an adventure, 12 and clara get locked up in a jail cell and 12 gets dosed with an aphrodisiac that makes him incredibly desperate for relief. Because aliens. 12’s not really in his right mind, and he keeps begging clara to help him. Clara is reluctant because he’s not really consenting to this, but he’s so desperate that he’s shaking and he looks like he’s in physical pain. Angsty handjob ensues.

Clara came to in what was probably a prison cell, considering the general path of her life. Face-down on the floor, no clear memory of the events preceding. She peeled herself up, propped on an elbow, and did a quick survey of the situation: a small, featureless room. The Doctor sitting against the wall, hunched over.

He started at the movement, then drooped in some mix of relief and resignation. “Hey.”

“Hello.” She waved.

He did not wave back. “How do you feel?”

“A bit groggy. Little banged up, nothing too bad.”

“Are you _sure_?” He looked startled by how loudly he’d said that.

Oh, not the duty of care thing again. She rolled her eyes, huffed out a sigh. “Yes. I’m sure.”

“Just checking. Sorry for shouting.”

She stood up, stretching out the kinks from being passed out on a metal floor. And then paused, mid-neck-crack: something was wrong. “How do you feel?” she asked carefully.

He just laughed. Not a good laugh, but that “I’m the universe’s oldest piece of shit ha ha” thing that always made her sick to her stomach.

“Doctor,” she said, slowly moving towards him, like you would a wounded wild animal. “Tell me what’s wrong.”

He flinched, pulling his knees tight against his chest. “The gas just knocked you out. I seem to be having a different, uh. A diff - different sort of reaction. I can flush the toxins out of my system, I’ll be fine, don’t worry.”

“Yeah, no, still gonna worry.” Good thing he wasn’t watching the poor excuse for a reassuring smile she was currently forcing. “I’m gonna see if I can figure out a way out of here, okay?”

 

* * *

 

 

There was not a way out of there. Not even a door that she could see, just smooth brushed metal walls, light that came from nowhere in particular. Nothing in the cell, not even dirt in the corners. No response to threats, requests, pleading, bargaining.

“Right. That exhausts my skill-set, what about yours? Still got the sonic glasses?”

He nodded, staring off into space.

“Feel like using them?”

Head-shake, no, not petulant but out of it.

“How about I give them a go? I know I lit you on fire last time but it’s not like we have a whole lot of options, here.”

He jerked his head towards her, eyes wild and red-rimmed. Opened his mouth, then clenched his teeth over whatever he’d been about to say. Heart in her throat, she approached him again, no sudden movements. He started shaking as she crouched down next to him, and scrambled away as she reached for his coat pocket.

“Why are you afraid of me?” She was, very possibly, panicking.

“Not afraid of you. Afraid of _me_. That I’ll hurt you.”

Was she entirely certain there was no visible way out of there? She double-checked, just in case. “You won’t hurt me,” she said very calmly. And again, like a mantra.

“Clara-”

“No. You won’t. Alright? You’re stronger than whatever this is.”

“Clara. Look at me. _Look_ at me, Clara.”

She looked. Not a huge fan of what she saw. She’d hoped she’d never have to learn what he looked like in agony, but apparently this was it: sweating and straining, eyes watering, hands clenched into white-knuckled fists.

He ground the words out slowly, a monumental effort. “It’s getting worse. I think it might get better after that. I hope. But if it gets bad, I mean. Really bad. Clara, my Clara. Promise me that you’ll punch me as hard as you possibly can.”

“I’m not gonna punch you.”

“Don’t tuck your thumb in. And aim for somewhere soft - have you taken self-defense courses?” His voice increasingly more hoarse, accent thicker.

“Doctor - ”

“Because it won’t be me, okay, I mean it, it, ah, it - it will be me, I’m not - but I’d never want to - I respect you and. And I love you, and I wouldn’t…”

She waited for the rest of the sentence, trying to recall if she’d packed pepper spray in the particular purse she’d brought today. And, Christ, he’d actually just said that he loved her. Terrible timing.

“What wouldn’t you do?” she whispered.

He just shook his head, swallowed hard, and turned away.

 

* * *

 

 

“I can feel you, you know,” he said half an hour later.

“Sorry?” She looked up from the game of Candy Crush that she was pretending to play.

A blitzed, zoned-out look on his face, he repeated: “I can feel you.”

“Okay.” That’s nice.

“I’m trying not to. But you’re just so _much._ ”

“Mmm.” She bent back over her phone, watching him out of the corner of her eye.

 

* * *

 

At some point she became aware of the fact that he was staring at her. And at a point after that, she became aware of the the specific weight of that stare.

“Are you…” she started. And stopped, looking at her reflection in the black screen of her phone. “Is this a. An alien sex thing?” Blurted out, get it over with, the plaster ripped off.

“Something like that,” he wheezed out.

For all this situation was fucked up, that shook her in an uncomfortably enjoyable way. “The gas was a. Like an aphrodisiac.”

“Worse.”

Okay then.

 

* * *

 

 

It wasn’t fair, she thought, as she lost another game of Plants vs Zombies. She’d long since moved past her stupid crush, she was mature enough to accept their relationship as it was. No more flirting, no more hoping for something other than friendship. Maybe, occasionally, she’d - appreciate him, in an other-than-friends sort of way, but deep down she knew, right, she knew they just weren’t like that. Would never be. And it was more than fine, was fantastic, even if it was a bit confusing to be so emotionally entangled in a platonic relationship.

So fuck whoever, whatever put them in this situation. Seriously. Fuck ‘em.

She did her best to ignore his heavy breathing, his shifting and readjusting of his - swimsuit area, let’s call it.

“I think I’ve figured it out,” he said. “Clearly this is building towards something. It expects a particular ending. And if I give it that ending, it’ll stop.”

“Seems reasonable,” she hedged.

“Clara, please.” Voice cracking on ‘please’.

In her safe space, now, a mental retreat. Floating off into the void. “You can take care of it. I won’t mind.”

“No, I mean. I need. I need _you_ , Clara, please, please I just-” He moved towards her, something utterly foreign on his face.

She kept her thumb untucked from her fist when she punched him.

 

* * *

 

 

“Sorry,” he said. His nose appeared mildly broken; she felt badly about it, in a ‘would totally do again’ sort of way.

Sorry, not sorry. The both of them. This was absurd.

“Do you really think that, uh. Taking care of that will take care of it?” She did her best to gesture at his raging erection without actually looking at it.

“My best guess.”

“Does it really need to be me?”

“No. Yes. I do and I don’t, I want - it’s all mixed up.” He scratched at the blood drying under his nose. “It’s all mixed up,” he said, quietly, to himself.

What a terrible way to have this conversation.

“I would,” she said. “Normally, I would not be against this. You know what humans are like, and as dumb as you are, you have to know by now that I’m. Attracted, to you. But this isn’t you.”

“No,” he said. “It’s not.”

Wasn’t an organic end to the conversation, but they both stopped talking for a while after that.

 

* * *

 

“This is absolutely against my better judgment but you’re clearly in agony and I can’t believe I’m saying this but can I, for fuck’s sake, just give you a quick handy so we can get out of this damn prison cell?” Because it’d been five hours and he looked half-dead and part of her was just over it. Solve the problem, get it done. She tried to ignore what that thought, the idea of this, what that was doing to her. That dirty-bad-wrong twinge of arousal.

He just stared at her.

She creaked out of the cross-legged-with-Super-Hexagon pose she’d been locked into for the past however long, set her phone down on the floor and crawled determinedly towards him. And he sat there, waiting, a blank expression on his face.

 

Turned out she didn’t even have to really do anything. The first tentative brush of her palm over his hard-on and he was gone. That laugh again, the “I think I’m an irredeemable bastard” one. They both ignored the wet spot on his trousers, and moved on.

 

(Setting #1792364 on the sonic sunglasses: unabsorbing the apparently absorbable wall from high-tech spaceships. The rest of the day was expectedly hectic but perfunctory. Neither of them reached for each other’s hands.)

 

 

* * *

 

 

The Doctor hid after that. Dropped Clara off back at her flat and fled. Two weeks, no contact. She texted him a few times, left a voicemail or two. Apologizing without referring to anything in particular.

And, fuck her, she kept thinking about it. Fantasizing about it. How it might have gone differently, if she’d made that decision quicker, he’d been less - whatever. If she’d really touched him, if there’d been less fear and regret in his eyes when he came. And she wondered, could not help but wonder, how much of that had been him, and how much had been whatever baffling alien physiology thing had been going on.

Like, maybe he did want her the way she wanted him. Maybe that old would-they-wouldn’t-they tension was coming back. Or could have come back, potentially, minus all the weird non-consenting sex-pollen thing they’d gone through. Maybe she’d taken an opportunity and thrown it out the fucking window.

 

* * *

 

 

The TARDIS landed in her neighborhood one day. Outside the chip shop. Just sat there. Clara stared at it a while before walking past it.

The next day, it was still there. She opened the door before she could talk herself out of it.

“I’m so sorry,” the Doctor said, as she said “So how’ve you been?”

Awkward.

“I’m sorry too,” she amended. “More sorry than you should be.”

He shrugged. “Over and done with, now. We’re both sorry. I was hoping we could just. Move on. I’ve got some fantastic planets lined up. Good old fashioned adventures, what d'you say?”

Moving on would be best. She both held that opinion and found herself saying: “We need to talk.”

“Yeah,” he said, visibly deflating. “You’re right. Again.”

“Bet you hate it when that happens.” Too soon for wisecracking? Probably. “Anyway. So.”

“So.”

Fuck it, she was gonna go for the throat. “We both stepped over some boundaries.”

“You were kind when I did not deserve it,” he corrected.

“I wanted to be kind.” Please, universe, let this be the one time he understood her subtext. “But you wouldn’t have asked me, in your right mind you wouldn’t have wanted that.”

“Yes. No. It - I remember feeling like a predator.” What, was this one-upmanship? Over who’d been a shittier person? Probably it’d be a draw. “Not caring about anything other than I wanted.”

“And I remember being willing to take advantage of it.” There you go, a draw.

Neither of them said anything, for a painfully long time.

“It’s just-” she began, as he tried: “I do-”

They laughed, awkwardly. He gestured for her to go first.

“It was just a sort of. Awful funhouse mirror version of something that I’ve always wanted.” The words tumbling out, before she could talk herself out of them.

“The same,” he said curtly. And less curtly: “Do you want to try again? Not like that, I mean, in the sense of - if we both, um. No, nevermind, terrible idea, redact that.”

She smiled nervously. “Not a bad idea. I mean if you do want to not do that, then okay, absolutely. But if you do. I do. We could, maybe.”

He looked at her like she was the most precious thing that he’d ever seen, and like he was terrified, and like he was committing to an ill-advised decision. “Slower this time. Holding hands, working our way up.”

“No mind-altering clouds of gas. Just us. If that’s okay?”

He nodded. She reached out to take his hand, squeezing gently, her fingers threaded through his. They stayed like that for a while, neither of them saying anything.


End file.
